It's going to be a top temperature of 79 degrees F (26C) today, 84F (29C) tomorrow and 81F (27C) on Wednesday. Yikes! Lois and I are not really used to these kind of temperatures, so we abandon our usual Monday walk on the local football field, and I do a 4.5 mile ride on my exercise bike instead.
10:00 I look at the Danish media (ekstrabladet.dk) on my smartphone. I see that former Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen is under fire again, this time for going round Denmark for weeks in a camper-van, and appearing in adverts for an East Jutland Campsite owner, while the Afghanistan crisis was in full swing.
Løkke being interviewed for ekstrabladet.dk
Lars Løkke with his wife on his long camping-trip round Denmark
Løkke is still an MP although he's no longer the head of the Venstre (Liberal) Party, but on his tour round the country he missed lots of high-level meetings in Copenhagen about the Danish withdrawal from Afghanistan - the press think his expertise would have been valuable to share at these meetings. He was Prime Minister during much of the period when Danish forces were deployed to the country.
Lois and I have followed Løkke's career with interest, ever since he shook our hands, and the hand of our daughter Alison, in the middle of Copenhagen in 2015 when he was campaigning in the General Election that swept him to power.
Flashback to 2015: Lois and I were siting in a square in the middle of Copenhagen, having lunch with our daughter Alison, when.....
..suddenly we
heard a commotion behind us..
from round the corner Lars Løkke Rasmussen (right) appeared with his Liberal Party entourage, plus pressmen and demonstrators, and he shook our hands right there, in the middle of Copenhagen, in the election campaign which swept him to power
We were sitting in the middle of Copenhagen that sunny day in 2015, because Alison and her family had recently moved there. They moved back to England in 2018 after a 6-year stay, during which Alison's husband Ed was working there as a legal adviser.
11:00 After my bike ride, despite the extreme heat, Lois and I risk being outside on the patio for 20 minutes while we sip our morning coffee and wolf down a biscuit or two.
we brave the heat on the patio for a coffee and biscuit
Lois showcases a rogue fuchsia that has somehow
managed to grow to a height of 6ft inside our boundary hedge -
what a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
I open my Father's Day present from Sarah, our daughter, who lives in Perth, Australia, with Francis and their 8-year-old twins. For some reason the Aussies celebrate Fathers Day in September. The gift turns out to be a lovely coffee mug and coaster, each saying "Best. Dad. Ever."
I showcase my Fathers Day present from Sarah, our daughter in Australia
In the picture above you can see, on the wall behind my right shoulder, a picture of a 2-year-old Lois, sitting on a bale of hay, one sunny day in 1948. What a long time ago that seems!
And on my lap is one of my books, "Language and History in Viking-Age England". I'm currently preparing to give a zoom presentation on October 1st to Lynda's U3A Middle English group, all about the influence of Old Norse on the history of the English language.
I've so far managed to produce 13 pages of material - it's not in finished form, because it'll need a lot of editing and rearranging, but I'm feeling a bit more relaxed now. I think that at least I've probably got most of my material now - it's just a case of massaging it and adding a bit more detail in some cases.
I'll be happy if I can talk for 40 minutes - that'll be a reasonable length of time. Also it will be quite convenient to restrict it to 40 minutes, because our group is too mean to pay for zoom sessions longer than 40 minutes - we always log out and log in again in order to finish out meetings, without having to pay a subscription.
If there are any questions I can take them after we all log back in: makes sense to me!
19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Seminar on zoom. I settle down on the couch in the living-room, with the idea of seeing Episode 1 of Season 2 of the Danish crime series "The Killing", a programme Lois doesn't like.
I've managed to see Seasons 1 and 3 in the evenings when Lois is otherwise occupied, so I've decided to go for the hattrick - wish me luck haha!!!!
I actually only manage to watch half of Episode 1 tonight - I'm taking it slowly, pausing it a lot, and making notes, so that I can begin to work out who all the characters are.
Inspector Sarah Lund (centre in picture above), and her boss, the expressionless Brix (left), are the only ones that I recognise from the other two seasons. I can see already that Sarah has a new sidekick - Ulrik (right, in picture above).
Since Season 1, Sarah has been downgraded to a routine job out in the sticks, but there's been a puzzling murder in Copenhagen, and Sarah's old boss, the expressionless Brix, wants her to come back and help him solve it.
How often does that sort of thing happen in fictional whodunnits, and I imagine never in real life haha! Still let's put that aside!
A woman has been stabbed several times and her dead body tied to a pole out in the woods somewhere. She had been in the process of getting a divorce from her husband after she discovered he was having an affair with his secretary.
Police think the husband broke into the woman's house and killed her, but to me it's interesting that, on the evening of the murder, the woman had got on the internet, then shad had a bath and done her nails, and then had started cooking something. Surely that means she was expecting a lover to call round and have an intimate evening with her? Maybe he was the killer!!!
Well, we'll see!
Sarah's boss, the expressionless Brix, takes Sarah round the flat of
the murdered woman, explaining what had happened
on the evening of the murder
As usual in "The Killing" there's also a political dimension involving the Justice Minister and the usual Danish coalition politics shenanigans, plus, as a surprise extra, a story about an Afghanistan War veteran being held n a psychiatric hospital. Yikes!!!!
This one's got it all, folks !!!!!
20:30 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we talk on the telephone to Alison, our elder daughter, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 children, Josie (who turns 15 tomorrow), Rosalind (13) and Isaac (11).
The kids are all back at school after the summer break, and Ali herself has started her new job as a teaching assistant at a school in Tilford, Surrey.
Isaac has started his first year at secondary school, where he's in a language immersion programme, which means he has Mandarin Chinese lessons, and also some non-core subject lessons actually in Mandarin - yikes!
Josie is embarking on work for the subjects she'll be taking examinations for at GCSE level, all the core subjects but also her personal choices of music and Spanish.
Ali is pleased so far with her job as teaching assistant. She gets to go home at 1 pm each day, thus getting free afternoons, which is nice. And all the kids come home on school buses, so she doesn't have to go pick them up.
Ali's optimum route from the family's home in Headley, Hampshire
to the school in Tilford, Surrey, where she has started work as a teaching assistant
The children she helps with, who are the year above Entry Level, whatever they call that these days, seem to be a nice bunch. There's only one obvious difficult case - a child suffering from "selective mutism", so he can't talk in situations he finds stressful. That'll be a challenge for her!
21:30 We watch a bit of TV, one of our favourite TV quizzes, "Only Connect", which tests lateral thinking.
Also, presenter Victoria Coren-Mitchell makes me feel a bit pathetic when she reads out a tweet from daytime TV presenter Richard Madeley, who used to co-present daytime chat shows with his wife Judy.
Richard and Judy Madeley on the couch during their
daytime TV chat show "This Morning"
Richard was famous for coming out with the most bizarre quotes, including Victoria's favourite: "Imagine if there had been Morris dancers at Dunkirk". And, according to Victoria, one of Richard's recent tweets was "Demolished daughter in 'Uni Challenge' tonight. but she came straight back and wasted me on 'Only Connect'. Grrrrr !!!! "
Oh dear, am I turning into another Richard Madeley? Suddenly I feel really rather cheap!!!!
Grrrrrr!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz !!!!!
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